Linux Tips & Tricks

[John Spikowski]

I thought I would pass on a couple tips & tricks I discovered after moving off Windows to the Ubuntu desktop. If you have discovered a cool trick or time saver you would like to mention, please post a reply to this thread.

Window state change

If you double clicked on a window title bar to maximize the window, you can return to it's normal size by just dragging the title bar.


Evolution reply text select

If you highlight the text in a message before clicking the reply button, only that text will show in the reply message.

[Donald Darden]

If you use Ubuntu for awhile. you may note an icon on the top toolbar may show up to indicate updates are available.  Sometimes thise appears as an orange gear icon, sometimes as an orange down aroow.If you are in a hurry to check for updates, you can use System/Update Manager, then after it checks whether you currently have any outstanding updates, you can click on Check, enter your user password, and it will check for other new updates.

I found that rather than then attempt to perform the downloads and updates at that point, to go to the update icon on the toolbar and left click on it.  Then click on the Install all updates choice.  It should show you a list of existing packages that will be inpacted.  You can then Mark all those packages, and continue the install process.  The main Update Manager window can then be closed while the updates are downloaded and installed.  This method seems to work very well. 

[John Spikowski]

Linux Virtual Desktop

A handy feature with Linux is the virtual desktop. You will notice in the lower right corner of your screen a set of squares. Clicking on these panels gives you a fresh desktop to group your tasks. I use this feature by using the primary desktop for Linux / Wine applications and the second panel as a full screen XP VirtualBox. If you right click on your active windows, there is a menu option to move the task to another desktop. You can drag your minimized windows on the task bar to another virtual desktop as well.


Integrated FTP / SSH

You can throw away your Cute FTP and PuTTY SSH applications as Linux has it built in. Click on the Places system menu and select the Connect to Server option. From here you can connect to another server via FTP or SSH. In both modes the remote server file system is presented as just another local navigator window which you can drag / drop, copy / past between systems. If you need a shell SSH connection to your remote server, open a xterm window and type the following at the prompt.

ssh user@server_url

You will be asked for your password after it connects. Just type exit to disconnect and return to your local xterm session.


Multiple Personalities

One of the cool features of Linux is it's abiltity to configure the user experiance to your own liking. Here are a couple examples for your enjoyment. (click on the image to see how it was done)

Mac OS X Theme




Vixta (Vista centric distro)



Cool Video

[Edwin Knoppert]

Wow!
Vixta looks nice.
This weekend i am going to dl the new Suse (11.0)
It has wine 1.0 as well, though it's a 4gb download.

I assume there isn't a virtual version of it? (vmware and such)